Pretty funny. As I wrote my technological thriller over the last year I seem to be about 6 months ahead of events. I could write a large portion of my novel just by using articles.

The technological premise behind my novel is that the stock market could be predicted if you read tweets, twitters and text to take a giant opinion pole. Now look at this article. Could be a direct quote from my novel.

You might think a 140 character tweet doesn't have much power, but, as one hedge fund proved, Twitter can help you win the stock market. "Derwent Capital, the hedge fund that is using Twitter sentiment to make its investments, beat the market--and other hedge funds--in its first full month of trading," All Twitter's Lauren Dugan reports (http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-hedge-fund-beat-market-in-its-first-month_b12786). Using an algorithm based on the social media mood that day, the hedge fund predicted the market to make the right trades. Sounds unbelievable that something cluttered with mundane musings and media links could have anything smart to say about the market. But it's working so far.

The idea behind it. Social media is a powerful force in the market--we think (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/08/social-media-could-be-making-market-crash-worse/41027/) it could be making things worse. This algorithm puts those ideas to the test. It's based on a paper (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1010/1010.3003v1.pdf) that came out of University of Manchester and Indiana University, which found a correlation between mood and Twitter, explains (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-22/hedge-fund-will-track-twitter-to-predict-stockmarket-movements.html) Bloomberg's Jack Jordan.

The number of emotional words on Twitter could be used to predict daily moves in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. A change in emotions expressed online would be followed between two and six days later by a move in the index, the researchers said, and this information let them predict its movements with 87.6 percent accuracy

knightrunnermat

08-19-2011, 12:17 AM

I found that a good writing exercise is to take a new development from the news, or science, or whatever and write about the consequences of that new happening. I did this with an article I read a few days ago and ended up getting obsessed with the story. I turned it into a short story. This sounds like what you are doing, except I am not quite as clairvoyant as you!

leahzero

08-19-2011, 01:26 AM

So...in theory...you could Twitter-bomb the stock market with all sorts of FUD and crash it.

In theory.

tko

08-19-2011, 05:02 AM

Nah, no one would believe it.

So...in theory...you could Twitter-bomb the stock market with all sorts of FUD and crash it.

In theory.

Namatu

08-19-2011, 07:45 PM

That's pretty cool.

I've been saving newspaper articles since the 1990s that show how the world my MC lives in developed. Yes, I've been planning for these characters for a little while. ;)